I think I'm about a year late to it, but PokeRogue is a browser-based Pokemon-themed roguelite where you pick a handful of starter Pokemon to go on an oppressively-hard 200-wave gauntlet. The gimmick of the game is that catching Pokemon you encounter permanently unlocks them as a starter, and you continually improve each stater's IV stats, nature options, ability options, and other bespoke forms of meta-progression by catching and hatching the same Pokemon repeatedly. One of the taglines I see repeated is "Win with your favorites!" and, given that each Pokemon can earn an additional unique passive ability and 4 extra egg moves to complement a certain playstyle, it does seem fairly achievable to make a powerhouse out of anything given enough effort. This video does a good job of showing what it's all about.

At first, I felt like the roguelite formula that it was using looked like utter chaos and nonsense, but the item spam and wild emergent metas have really grown on me. It's not a complete replacement for a traditional Pokemon game, but the surrounding context of PokeRogue puts a very compelling twist on a 99.9% faithful battle system re-implementation, emphasizing things like health sustainability, PP efficiency, stat-boosting moves (since they often carry between battles), and burst power.

The difficulty is immense, but I feel like the meta progression eventually makes things smooth enough to tread water. The initial account phase of trying to catch anything and everything in order to get something viable enough to go further and further is a struggle, but eventually you'll be able to get something decent enough to start holding its own. I recently solo'd the entire 200 waves with a Core Enforcer Tatsugiri by accident (my second win); I only meant to farm candies for another Pokemon, but with random item drops it ended up snowballing out of control to the point that a Nasty Plot per trainer enabled a full sweep.

PokeRogue also really scratches the collector itch in my brain given that you can not only catch every Pokemon, but also improve each one individually and then further collect 3 unique shiny variants per (you can also unlock even more pride shiny colors as of this month!). I'm having a good time for now. The devs seem very active, and the project is fully open source, which is awesome. You can run your own PokeRogue server if you like, though they won't let you import your save to the official one later.

Have you played PokeRogue before? What are your thoughts, have you done something nuts in it, does it get old, etc.?